Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said tweets sent by White House adviser Ivanka Trump, meant to draw attention to weekend violence in the Windy City, were “dangerous.”
In an interview with CNN on Thursday, Lightfoot criticized the first daughter for not calling her office before sending out a pair of tweets that failed to get the facts straight.
“I think if you really want to be helpful, and particularly given the platform you’re in, you actually pick up the phone and you call and you talk to us about what actually happened, so we could have given her a full rundown of what the facts were, and then we have a communication about what is the best path forward,” the Democratic mayor told host Anderson Cooper.
“I understand that she thought she was being helpful, but her failure — or anybody on her team — to just pick up the phone and communicate with us was really disappointing,” she added.
Trump’s tweet Tuesday noted how the media largely ignored the widespread violence in Chicago over the weekend while most outlets around the country focused a great deal of coverage on deadly mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, that killed at least 31 people.
“As we grieve over the evil mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, let us not overlook that Chicago experienced its deadliest weekend of the year,” Trump tweeted in a thread that was liked and retweeted thousands of times. “With 7 dead and 52 wounded near a playground in the Windy City- and little national outrage or media coverage- we mustn’t become numb to the violence faced by inner city communities every day.” The tweets have not been taken down.
With 7 dead and 52 wounded near a playground in the Windy City- and little national outrage or media coverage- we mustn’t become numb to the violence faced by inner city communities every day.
— Ivanka Trump (@IvankaTrump) August 6, 2019
Although it was a violent weekend in Chicago, with at least 29 shooting incidents across the city from Friday afternoon to Monday morning, it was not the deadliest weekend of the year in Chicago and only one incident took place near a playground. That shooting, which took place at about 1:20 a.m. near a playground in Douglas Park, resulted in seven people being wounded, including a 21-year-old man who was shot in the groin and transported to a local hospital in critical condition.
Lightfoot, who criticized Trump in a press conference later that day for not calling her office and warning of the “danger of trying to govern via tweet,” told Cooper that Chicago did experience rampant violence over the weekend, but Trump’s flub was treacherous.
“Look, don’t get me wrong, we had a tough weekend, but conflating all of that and getting the facts wrong and getting — saying the playground, which it wasn’t near a playground, and suggesting that children were at risk was dangerous and unhelpful,” she said.
Cooper asked if there is any equivalence between the violence in Chicago and the two mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton.
“The circumstances of each of these are tragic. That is absolutely a common theme that runs through them. And I don’t want people to lose sight about the fact that we are experiencing shootings at a pace that no one finds acceptable, but conflating the hateful rhetoric that I think motivated, sounds like motivated the shooter in El Paso, and we still don’t really know what the motivation of the shooter was in Dayton, to what we’re experiencing I think really does a disservice to victims, the cities that are reeling, the families that are suffering from gun violence,” Lightfoot said, adding, “They’re not apples to apples comparison.”
Cooper, noting how the mayor met with Trump around the time of her inauguration in May, asked Lightfoot if she has spoken to the first daughter since then. Lightfoot said she has not talked to Trump since their meeting in Washington, but their staff has been in touch.
Lightfoot also accused Trump’s father, President Trump, of using Chicago as a “punching bag” along with other major cities to score political points with his supporters.
“The president’s rhetoric is all part of a perpetual reelection strategy where he demonizes and dismisses cities where he’s not going to get a substantial vote. Let’s face it. The cities that he’s picked are Democratic strongholds. He’s not going to get votes here of any magnitude,” she said.
“So it’s easy for him given his, you know, diminishing base to demonize us and the challenges that we face in cities and reduce us to a punch line rather than looking at the greatness that’s actually happening in each of these cities. Yes, we have our challenges, but we are a great city, and I’m never going to let anybody, including a president, diminish the greatness of Chicago,” Lightfoot said.
